Senior Associate, Strategy & Operations, CEO Office

Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. More than 675,000 businesses, including McLaren Racing, Qantas, SHEIN, and TikTok, use us, directly or through our platform partners, to run their financial operations or build and monetize financial products of their own.

We started in Melbourne in 2015 to build the infrastructure global commerce runs on. We're the regulated backbone behind global payments: not by accident, but by design. A decade plus, 85+ licenses, and a financial infrastructure spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.

We're co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, with more than 2,700 people across 27 offices. We hire builders with founder-level energy, people who move fast with good judgment, dig in with real curiosity, and make calls from first principles rather than waiting to be told what to do. Read our operating principles to see it in full.

The CEO Office Strategy & Operations team partners directly with Airwallex's executive leadership on the company's most important priorities.

We work across regions and functions to turn complex, ambiguous problems into clear decisions and executable plans. Our work spans market expansion, new business and product initiatives, operating model design, and other strategic priorities that require coordination across multiple parts of Airwallex.

The team combines rigorous problem-solving with hands-on execution. We don’t stop at making recommendations—we work with Product, Engineering, Legal, Compliance, Risk, Finance, Treasury, Operations, and Commercial teams to turn strategy into reality.

It is a high-visibility, fast-moving environment for people who enjoy solving difficult problems, working across disciplines, and building things where the playbook does not yet exist.

As Senior Associate, Global Expansion Strategy & Operations, you will help take new Airwallex markets from strategy to launch across the Americas.

You will work alongside senior members of the CEO Office and leaders across the company to answer some of the hardest questions involved in entering a new financial market: Where should we enter? How should we enter? What do we need to build? What could prevent us from launching? And how do we make each subsequent expansion faster and more scalable?

This role goes beyond traditional program management. You will be expected to understand the substance behind the workstreams you support, form hypotheses, identify what is actually blocking progress, and help move complex issues toward decisions.

Over time, you will develop a broad understanding of how a global financial platform is built – from regulatory strategy and product infrastructure to operations and commercial launch.

This role is based in San Francisco.

Responsibilities:

• Build market-entry strategies. Assess market attractiveness, customer opportunity, competitive dynamics, regulatory feasibility, and Airwallex’s right to win. Help develop recommendations on where we should expand and what capabilities we need to succeed.

• Design the market-entry model. Evaluate licensing pathways, entity structures, partnerships, and operating models. Work with Legal, Compliance, Finance, Treasury, and other teams to translate regulatory constraints into practical business and operating decisions.

• Translate strategy into product requirements. Partner with Product and Engineering to convert market-entry and regulatory requirements into concrete product scope, sequencing, and launch dependencies. Help ensure the roadmap reflects what is actually required to operate and scale locally.

• Drive cross-functional launch readiness. Own defined workstreams within market launches and work across functions to identify critical-path dependencies, surface blockers early, establish clear ownership, and drive issues toward resolution. Support go/no-go decisions across product, regulatory, operational, risk, and commercial dimensions.

• Enable executive decision-making. Synthesize complex and sometimes conflicting perspectives into clear choices and recommendations. Prepare concise materials for CEO Office and executive leadership on market prioritization, investment decisions, key trade-offs, risks, and launch readiness.

• Build the Global Expansion operating system. Develop reusable frameworks, dashboards, templates, and lightweight AI-enabled tools that make expansion more systematic. Automate areas such as regulatory research, licence mapping, competitive intelligence, status reporting, risk tracking, and dependency management where doing so improves speed and quality.

• Take on broader CEO Office priorities. Flex onto high-priority initiatives beyond core market expansion, including strategic reviews, restructuring or migration programs, crisis-response workstreams, and cross-market operating or structuring questions.

Minimum qualifications:

• 2–4 years of experience in top-tier strategy consulting (MBB or equivalent), or in a strategy, operations, expansion, product strategy, or regulatory role within fintech, payments, banking, or financial infrastructure.

• Strong structured problem-solving skills. You can take an ambiguous problem, break it down, identify what matters most, and develop a point of view without waiting for perfect information.

• Experience driving at least one complex cross-functional initiative involving product, regulatory, operational, or commercial stakeholders, with clear personal ownership for moving the work forward.

• Excellent communication and synthesis. You can go deep enough to understand a complex issue and then explain it clearly and concisely to different audiences, including senior stakeholders.

• High ownership and operating discipline. You move quickly, manage dependencies and follow-through reliably, seek feedback early, and are willing to roll up your sleeves when needed.

• Comfort using AI tools. You use AI for research, analysis, drafting, synthesis, or workflow improvement and exercise sound judgment around verification, source quality, and when human expertise is required.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience in fintech, payments, banking, or financial infrastructure, particularly in strategy, operations, product, expansion, or regulatory roles

• Experience in financial or payments markets in Latam

• Experience supporting new-market launches, new financial products, or other complex cross-functional initiatives.

• Exposure to financial-services regulation or licensing, such as payments, money transmission, e-money, banking, card issuing, or FX.

• Experience working across functions such as Product, Engineering, Legal, Compliance, Risk, Finance, Treasury, Operations, and Commercial to deliver a shared business outcome.

• Experience building lightweight automation, dashboards, or AI-enabled workflows to improve research, reporting, decision-making, or program execution.

• Fluency in Spanish and/or Portuguese.

To protect you from recruitment scams, please be aware that Airwallex will not ask for bank details, sensitive ID numbers (i.e. passport), or any form of payment during the application or interview process. All official communication will come from an @airwallex.com email address. Please apply only through careers.airwallex.com or our official LinkedIn page.

Airwallex does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firms/recruiters. Airwallex will not pay any fees to search firms/recruiters if a candidate is submitted by a search firm/recruiter unless an agreement has been entered into with respect to specific open position(s). Search firms/recruiters submitting resumes to Airwallex on an unsolicited basis shall be deemed to accept this condition, regardless of any other provision to the contrary.

Airwallex is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and anyone seeking employment at Airwallex is considered based on merit, qualifications, competence and talent. We don’t regard color, religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, ancestry, citizenship, sex, marital or family status, disability, gender, or any other legally protected status when making our hiring decisions. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.